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Wednesday, 26 August 2015

Creating a Universal Logical Switch in NSX 6.2 and vMotioning a VM from one vCenter to another

Now that we have our Universal Transport Zone that spans clusters across multiple vCenter servers it's time to create a Universal Logical Switch, attach two virtual machines to it and then vMotion one from the Palo Alto vCenter to the New York vCenter. One thing to remember when creating any universal objects is that they need to be created on the NSX Manager that has the primary role. If you try to do it whilst connected to an NSX Manager with the secondary role you will not see any Universal Transport Zones. Log into the vSphere Web Client and navigate to Logical Switches within the Network & Security tab and create a new Logical Switch whilst ensuring you are connected to the NSX Manager with the primary role:

Once the switch has been created you will notice that it's VNI number falls inline with the range we specified within the Universal Segment ID Pool:

If you switch across to the NSX Manager with the secondary role you will also see the same Universal Logical Switch created with the same VNI number:

If we check the VDS portgroups you should see the newly created portgroup in both vCenters:

I have the following two VM's which I am going to attach to the Universal-Web-Tier-01 Logical Switch and power on ensuring that are both in the same vCenter:

WEB01 - 192.168.1.11

WEB02 - 192.168.1.12

As you can see we have layer 2 connectivity between the two virtual machines:

Now time to vMotion WEB02 from the Palo Alto vCenter (PA-VCSA-01) to the New York vCenter (NY-VCSA-01). Right click on the VM and select Migrate:

Select the option to Change Compute Resources only and click Next (The same storage is available to both vCenters / hosts in my lab):

Click on the clusters tab and select the cluster you want to migrate the VM to and click Next. In my example I am moving WEB02 from the PA-Compute cluster in PA-VCSA-01 to the NY-Compute cluster in NY-VCSA-01:

Select the folder to place the VM into and click Next:

Select the network you want to attach the VM to in the other vCenter. In my example I'm connecting it to the same Universal Logical Network. It would be nice for this to have been automatically selected for me:

Set the appropriate priority and click Next:

Verify your setting, click Next and watch the magic happen:

WEB02 has now been vMotioned from the Palo Alto vCenter across to the New York vCenters with no drop in connectivity:

The possibilities for this are endless especially around Disaster Recovery with Site Recovery Manager.